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Ascetic Culture honors Philip Rousseau’s pathbreaking work on early Christian asceticism in a series of essays exploring how quickly the industrious and imaginative practitioners of asceticism, from the early fourth through the mid-fifth century, adapted the Greco-Roman social, literary, and religious culture in which they had been raised. Far from rejecting the life of the urban centers of the ancient world, they refined and elaborated that life in their libraries, households, and communities.
The volume begins with a discussion of Egyptian monastic reading programs and the circulation of texts, especially the hugely influential Life of Antony. A second group of essays engages the topic of disciplinary culture in ascetic spaces such as the monastery, the household, and the city. A third group focuses on the topic of imaginary landscapes and ascetic self-fashioning. Ascetic Culture concludes by surveying the scholarly study of asceticism over the last one hundred and fifty years, arguing that previous generations of scholars have regarded asceticism either as a product of the inner dynamism of early Christianity or as a distortion of its earliest aims. Together, the contributors recognize, reflect upon, and extend the themes explored in Rousseau’s work on early Christianity’s ascetic periphery—a region whose inhabitants reflect in various ways the aspirations of their religion, from the daily to the otherworldly.
“The editors of this volume honoring Philip Rousseau, who has been writing on late antique ascetism and wider-ranging topics for forty-five years and whose ‘curiosity is insatiable and his industry steady’ (p. 4), have supplied several generations of scholars not only with pillowcases but with plenty of treasured goodies.” —Anglican Theological Review
Robin Darling Young is associate professor with the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.
List of Abbreviations
Introduction by Blake Leyerle and Robert Darling Young
Part I. Books as Guides
1.Pachomius and the Mystery of the Letters by Joel Kalvesmaki
2. Writing Rules and Quoting Scripture in Early Coptic Monastic Texts by Janet A. Timbie
3. The Life of Antony in Egypt by Malcolm Choat
4. Apologetics of Asceticism: The Life of Antony and Its Political Context by Samuel Rubenson
5. The Memory Palace of Marcellinus: Athanasius and the Mirror of the Psalms by Georgia Frank
Part II. Disciplines and Arenas
6. From the Pillar to the Prison: Penitential Spectacles in Early Byzantine Monasticism by Daniel F. Caner
7. Cassian, Cognition, and the Common Life by Catherine M. Chin
8. Gender, Eros, and Pedagogy: Macrina’s Pious Household by Virginia Burrus
9. Waiting for Theodosius, or The Ascetic and the City: Gregory of Nazianzus on Maximus the Philosopher by Susanna Elm
Part III. Landscapes (with Figures)
10. Remembering for Eternity: The Ascetic Landscape as Cultural Discourse in Early Christian Egypt by James E. Goehring
11. Xeniteia According to Evagrius of Pontus by Robin Darling Young
12. Adam, Eve, and the Elephants: Asceticism and Animality by Patricia Cox Miller
13. The Consolation of Nature: Fields and Gardens in the Preaching of John Chrysostom by Blake Leyerle
Part IV. Founding the Field
14. Adolf Harnack and the Paleontological Layer of Church History by Claudia Rapp
15. From East to West: Christianity, Asceticism, and Nineteenth-Century Protestant Professors in America by Elizabeth A. Clark
Select Publications of Philip Rousseau
General Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index